The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [126]
Before the embassy bombings, bin Laden had been secretly indicted merely for “conspiracy to attack.” After the bombings, a two-hundred-page public indictment charged him with a litany of alleged crimes. A $5 million reward was offered for information leading to his arrest. The figure would rise to $25 million after 9/11, and was later doubled.
At the CIA after the bombings, combating the bin Laden threat was raised to “Tier 0” priority, one of the very highest levels. “We are at war,” Director Tenet declared in a memo soon after. “I want no resources or people spared in this effort.” President Clinton, for his part, signed a further “lethal force” order designed to ensure it was possible to circumvent the ban on targeted assassination. Nevertheless, and though operations against bin Laden were planned repeatedly during the two years that remained of the Clinton administration, none got the go-ahead.
Since 9/11, there have been bitter recriminations. “Policy makers seemed to want to have things both ways,” Tenet wrote. “They wanted to hit bin Laden but without endangering U.S. troops or putting at significant risk our diplomatic relations.”
In one year alone, former bin Laden unit head Scheuer wrote in 2008, the CIA presented Clinton with “two chances to capture bin Laden and eight chances to kill him using U.S. military air power.” The blame for failing to act on such occasions, according to Scheuer, lay in part with the White House and in part with his own boss. Quoting Clinton aides, he said, “Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the President and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence … it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fall-out if an attempt to get bin Laden failed.”
Scheuer’s most savage barb, however, was aimed at the President and aides Berger and Clarke. They, Scheuer would have it, “cared little about protecting Americans and were not manly enough to order such an attack, and their moral cowardice resulted in three thousand deaths on 9/11.” The words “moral cowardice,” in the context of Clinton and his people, occur no fewer than six times in Scheuer’s book.
Richard Clarke, for his part, thought the CIA had proved “pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.… I still do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination, who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him.”
Comments by the former President and Berger on the failure to get bin Laden remain in closed Commission files. As recently as 2006, however, Clinton continued to insist that he “authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him … I tried.” The Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, agreed that one of the President’s secret orders—still withheld today—was indeed a “kill authority.” All the same, the Report noted, Clinton and Berger had worried lest “attacks that missed bin Laden could enhance his stature and win him new recruits.”
Had the world been able to witness the way bin Laden conducted himself in August 1998, when told of the death and damage the missile attacks had caused, his image would surely not have been enhanced.
“My father,” his son Omar recalled, “was struck by the most violent, uncontrollable rage. His face turned red and his eyes flashed as he began rushing about, repeatedly quoting the same verse from the Qur’an, The God kills the ones who attacked! … May God kill the ones who attacked! How could anyone attack Muslims? How could anyone attack Muslims? Why would anyone attack Muslims!’ ”
For a while after the missile attacks, bin Laden went to ground, rarely slept in the same place two nights running. He stopped using his satellite phone, which up to now had been a boon to those tracking him. Within a day of the U.S. onslaught, though, he